Violent Night (2022)

directed by Timmy Wirkola

USA

112 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This is still playing in theaters at the time of writing, but I didn't see it in a theater due to the plague. I don't watch many movies that get a theatrical release, so it's always a weird experience to watch something on the small screen that I know was intended to wow a theater audience, with all the conceits that that entails - all the glossiness, the stuff meant to look good Huge with a capital H. Watching any blockbuster nowadays feels like how watching a 3D movie in 2D used to feel: You notice all the things that are meant to stick out, and they look awkward because you're not watching it how it's intended. Overall this movie has an über-polished vibe that I'm not used to seeing and am not big on. This is a personal opinion, though, and it's coming from someone whose perspective is super skewed - most of the stuff I watch is like 50 years old.

So those are most of my misgivings. I enjoyed this for the most part, and I appreciate how thoroughly it commits to the bit. This is a nearly two-hour-long movie; something I've noticed about Christmas horror films is that they tend to be really short, because there's not much idea to go around. The goal is usually to A. be a horror movie and B. be set near Christmas, and that's all. So the bar is not very high, but Violent Night still manages to inject creativity into an area that's getting fairly old. I do consider this a horror film, although it is stretching my definition a little and would more comfortably be called a plain old action movie. In my opinion, the level of gore in this and the specific nature of the gore fits better in a horror film than anything else.

There's not much about this that is particularly original plotwise. You could stick the storyline into any movie. A man comes back to his incredibly wealthy family's home (it's a compound, actually) for the holidays, with his wife and daughter in tow, but they get home-invaded by a large group of mercenaries who happen to know there's an absurd amount of cash in a safe in the basement. Really, you do not have to care about the plot at all. The only factor that's getting anybody interested in this is that it's a Christmas movie. I noticed that this does not feel like a movie for people who hate Christmas or one for people who love it, it just kind of is what it is, but it is that so emphatically that I appreciate it. It does have a little bit of that cliche "true meaning of Christmas" message, but it doesn't try to beat you over the head with it. It's not trying to move you over to one camp or another. It's just accepting that Christmas, despite being over-commercialized and exhausting, happens every year, and boy, wouldn't it be fun to make a movie with a bunch of gory fight scenes about it.

The real centerpiece of this is David Harbour's Santa. I don't know how I feel about Harbour as an actor in general or on a technical level, but one thing I do know about him is that I believe him in any and every role he plays. Maybe he does end up kind of playing a specific kind of guy a lot, but he plays that guy so well that he manages to bring his "that guy"-ness to Santa Claus and have it come off genuine. Violent Night's Santa is tired of it all, tired of bringing gifts to billions of ungrateful children, tired of the work, tired of having done the same thing for thousands of years. He doesn't mean to be a hero, but he gets drawn into the interrupted family drama going down at the compound and ends up being one anyway. I did get a little (okay, maybe a lot) tired of the juvenile humor; there's a lot of drunk jokes and shit jokes and just a very lowbrow tone that I don't think this movie needed. But again - Harbour does this all very un-self-consciously.

This portrayal of Santa is what makes the whole film stick out from others that have done similar things. Again I really feel like the key word here is "wholehearted". This IS Santa, and he's not just the jolly, perpetually smiling Santa on greeting cards and soda ads, he's an ancient, pre-Christian being who at some point was a man but is something different now. This Santa carries with him a deep history. We see this in brief flashbacks as well as in the extensive tattoos he has, which I thought were a really neat touch. Tommy Wirkola is Norwegian, so that kind of vaguely Scandinavian-flavored Santa is definitely done better than he would have been in a different director's hands, but I'm still not going to go into historical analysis. I'll just leave it at saying that I enjoy the nuance very much. Santa's costume echoes some of that nuance as well; again, it doesn't attempt to be a historical piece, but when you look closely there's something fine about it. It's made out of red leather, instead of cloth, and the fur trimming doesn't look cheap and ratty. It makes him look like he could be an unusually well-dressed department store Santa, or he could be the real thing, the thing that all other department store Santas are parodying. And of course there is the sledgehammer.

There's... not really much more I can find to say about this one, which is ironic for a movie that is one of the more original and interesting Christmas horror films I've seen in recent years. It was good but I can't muster up a lot of enthusiasm about it. A lot of the jokes fail to hit, or at least they did for me, your mileage may vary. Arguably the grossest scene in the whole film happens within about two minutes of the opening, so it weeds out the people who can't stomach its brand of humor pretty fast. Nobody in this is the kind of person you really care about except for the little girl, which is probably by design. It's visually smooth and spotless and in so many words just has that "big movie" feel, except applied to a subject matter that is fairly niche. I actually am surprised this is getting such a wide theatrical run. I have a feeling that few people are going to end up seeing this, despite its presence in so many cinemas, but you could do worse than this if you are willing to risk going to see a movie at this moment in time. Or you could watch Dead Snow. You should probably watch Dead Snow.